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On March 20 2026 20:17 0x64 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 20 2026 11:16 Kerotan wrote:
Its an interesting video, because the iranian situation this is the first I'm hearing it.I'd heard about GPS failing in Moscow due to suspected Russian EWar.
I dislike the title of the video because its a tad sensationalist, but you gotta get clicks right? In particular because
coups are hard to call. No one saw prizoghians thunder run on Moscow coming, even in spite of all his wild rhetoric. A delberate internet shutdown in your nations capital is clearly a sign of paranoia, but this has been the case for a while now.
I'm not super in the know but I'm under the impression that there is no generalismo who has the personal popularity to wield a coup into action. Surovikin? Unlikely due to the shady stuff with Wagner. Gerasimov? In a good position but doesn't fit the character.
But again, this is how coups work, and paraphrasing Hemmingway: How did I get coup de etat? gradually and then suddenly.
It would be utter chaos if it does happen, but my money is on Putin dying of natural causes before it does. Yeah it's a case of "if somebody could have done, they'd done it already" and candidates keep randomly dying just to be sure no one gets the wrong idea. This strategy didn't have a breaking point with Stalin, why would it have with Putin. Basically, you already need those tools, to access the power, so once you are there... Basically, Putin would need a successor that he'd be sure would do everything possible that he does not end up in Prison, but he trusts no one.
I think if a coup were to happen, you definitively wouldn't suspect it or its source beforehand. Because Putin is paranoid as fuck, so if you suspect it, Putin would also suspect it, and people would fall out of windows beforehand.
The only ways for a coup to work is for it to be either very surprising, or to have overwhelming support in the military.
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Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Oleksandr Syrskyi reported that Russian forces intensified ground attacks across the theater in the last week, which is consistent with ISW’s assessment that Russian forces have launched their Spring-Summer 2026 offensive.
So, according to Syrsky and by ISW's assessment, the Russian Spring/Summer 2026 offensive is under way and it seems to be focusing on trying to get the rest of Donbas.
This is consistent with the recent record breaking uptick in casualties on the Russian side as well as the uptick in the number of lost assets, the most eye popping ones being the elimination of 2 KA-52 helicopters, one of which got gotten by a FPV drone.
I don't see how this goes super well for Russia, of course, it's again very bloody and fucked up affair for the Ukrainian defenders who will, I'm sure pay a very heavy price as well, but the losses that are being reported are mind boggling, just in 2 days Russia lost more people then combined casualties on both sides in the Israel-USA war on Iran over almost 4 weeks now.
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On March 25 2026 01:58 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2026 23:23 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 24 2026 12:14 KwarK wrote:
There is no “walk away” option for the US. Abandoning the Persian Gulf entirely would be an absolute surrender. There are a dozen reasons for Iran to keep the strait closed for a long time.
Iran has, so far this war, taken orders of magnitude more damage than the US. The US has lost a handful of planes and crew and a lot of interceptors. Iran has lost its navy, air force, hardened bunkers, warehouses, stockpiles, bases etc., in addition to the new Supreme Leader having had his father, wife, and teenage son killed.
As I keep repeating, the US and Israel peak immediately, they do the most damage on day 1 where they destroy all the highest value targets. On day 2 they destroy the second highest value targets because they can't destroy the highest value targets a second time. On day 3 the third. The longer the war goes the less damage bombing can do. They already killed his wife, they can't do it again.
Iran's retaliation grows steadily over time but doesn't even start to kick in until day 150 or so. There is significant latency between crude oil leaving the Gulf and the diesel in a gas station. Consumers haven't actually seen any impact in supply yet. The prices increases are speculative, suppliers don't want to sell today if they think that the price will be higher tomorrow and they won't have oil tomorrow to sell. And even once the supply does drop the strategic reserves have enough to cover months of the missing output from the Gulf. As the strategic reserves run low the prices will increase. As prices increase additional more expensive sources of oil will be brought online which will be priced accordingly. The longer it goes the higher the price gets.
That is Iran's retaliation. It hasn't started yet and it won't have any deterrence impact if they sign an early ceasefire. Even if Israel and the US stop bombing entirely they still need to interdict it, or charge such high transit fees that prices are higher. They need people to remember that 2026 was the year where there was a global recession caused by high oil prices so that the next time someone wants to bomb Iran they think twice. If Iran opens the strait early then they have no deterrent. They'd be saying "feel free to bomb the shit out of us for a week, we'll announce a disruption but as long as you stocked up the reserve ahead of time you can weather it". They'll get bombed by Israel once a year.
The idea that the US and Israel can beat the shit out of Iran, kill the leader's wife, kill his son, and then call a timeout before he hits back is absurd to me. It would undermine every single part of their publicly stated strategy of using the strait as a last resort deterrent bargaining chip. They constructed this strategy over decades, they know this. It would be national suicide.
The idea that Iran, one of the largest oil exporters in the world, has nothing to gain from spiking oil prices is nuts. The regime and country have been absolutely savaged. I've been hating on American strategy a lot here because the American strategy is nonsensical but that doesn't mean that the USAF can't demolish buildings. They were in terrible shape before and much worse shape now than they were then. If the regime is to survive they need hard foreign currency. They need their oil on the market and as few of their competitors as possible as a matter of national survival. The rebuilding project will not be cheap and there are a lot of regime loyalists who will need to be paid.
Additionally it simply wouldn't make sense not to continue the position that they control the strait. Free navigation of the seas is a postwar American invention enforced by the US Navy. Lots of countries would like to declare that actually they own this bit of water or that bit of water and that everyone has to pay them transit fees or whatever but they haven't been able to because the US Navy will disprove that notion. These waterways aren't just open by default, they're national territory by default, open is an artificial state of affairs that has been constructed and maintained by the US Navy. If the US declares that they're no longer interested in keeping the strait open then it won't suddenly revert to free neutrality under a ceasefire. It'll be owned by the strongest.
This is existential for Iran. Either they establish a convincing deterrent by confronting the US Navy over the strait and winning (which includes the US Navy forfeiting) or they die. There's no deal to be made here where the strait is reopened any time soon, it'll stay closed until such a time as a country with sufficient force projection to open it opens it. Can/should the world make the US a pariah state for an illegal war of choice leading to global recession? How about the European countries facilitating it? Or is the US integrated into the global economy (and their European accomplices dependent) in such a way that they can't be held accountable for their crimes? What would any of that look like? Those are general questions not specific to Kwark btw. The question doesn't really make sense. Let's imagine a town filled with people. And not civic minded Nordic people who pick up litter when they go for a walk in the woods, let's imagine it's filled with people who would steal Amazon packages from each others' porches. Fortunately there's a chief of police and a police force and they mostly get everyone to behave and as such everyone in the town can benefit from the predictable order of law, they can order things from Amazon, they can leave the house to go to work and still have their stuff when they come home etc. If you start breaking the rules then you're excluded from the society, people won't let you in their shops, they won't sell you gasoline, you get disconnected from utilities, it's a bad time. Now let's imagine the chief of police fires the police force and burns down the courthouse. What you're asking is what he should be convicted of and how long he should spend in jail. It doesn't work. That is absolutely not the same thing as him getting away with the crime of burning down the courthouse, it's just no longer functional to think of burning down the courthouse as a crime. Getting away with a crime would be continuing to benefit from the society built on a system of rules without being held accountable for breaking them (Israel gets away with having nukes for example). What he has done is remove the rules entirely and return the town to the natural state of anarchy. That is not to say that there won't be consequences, it's just the concept of being prosecuted has gone. The consequences will show up with the power goes off because someone decided to steal the copper in the substation for scrap metal. They'll be more or less self imposed. In the scenario in which the US engages in an illegal war and sends the world into a global recession while destroying its own alliance system there are no more pariah states and there is no more accountability. This is what Carney was explaining so beautifully at Davos. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/
How do you figure this impacts Russia-Ukraine? Doesn't seem like it would bode well in Ukraine's favor, but perhaps the "middle powers" can use Ukraine as a focal point to rally around like a cloud seed?
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United States43758 Posts
On March 25 2026 03:20 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On March 25 2026 01:58 KwarK wrote:On March 24 2026 23:23 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 24 2026 12:14 KwarK wrote:
There is no “walk away” option for the US. Abandoning the Persian Gulf entirely would be an absolute surrender. There are a dozen reasons for Iran to keep the strait closed for a long time.
Iran has, so far this war, taken orders of magnitude more damage than the US. The US has lost a handful of planes and crew and a lot of interceptors. Iran has lost its navy, air force, hardened bunkers, warehouses, stockpiles, bases etc., in addition to the new Supreme Leader having had his father, wife, and teenage son killed.
As I keep repeating, the US and Israel peak immediately, they do the most damage on day 1 where they destroy all the highest value targets. On day 2 they destroy the second highest value targets because they can't destroy the highest value targets a second time. On day 3 the third. The longer the war goes the less damage bombing can do. They already killed his wife, they can't do it again.
Iran's retaliation grows steadily over time but doesn't even start to kick in until day 150 or so. There is significant latency between crude oil leaving the Gulf and the diesel in a gas station. Consumers haven't actually seen any impact in supply yet. The prices increases are speculative, suppliers don't want to sell today if they think that the price will be higher tomorrow and they won't have oil tomorrow to sell. And even once the supply does drop the strategic reserves have enough to cover months of the missing output from the Gulf. As the strategic reserves run low the prices will increase. As prices increase additional more expensive sources of oil will be brought online which will be priced accordingly. The longer it goes the higher the price gets.
That is Iran's retaliation. It hasn't started yet and it won't have any deterrence impact if they sign an early ceasefire. Even if Israel and the US stop bombing entirely they still need to interdict it, or charge such high transit fees that prices are higher. They need people to remember that 2026 was the year where there was a global recession caused by high oil prices so that the next time someone wants to bomb Iran they think twice. If Iran opens the strait early then they have no deterrent. They'd be saying "feel free to bomb the shit out of us for a week, we'll announce a disruption but as long as you stocked up the reserve ahead of time you can weather it". They'll get bombed by Israel once a year.
The idea that the US and Israel can beat the shit out of Iran, kill the leader's wife, kill his son, and then call a timeout before he hits back is absurd to me. It would undermine every single part of their publicly stated strategy of using the strait as a last resort deterrent bargaining chip. They constructed this strategy over decades, they know this. It would be national suicide.
The idea that Iran, one of the largest oil exporters in the world, has nothing to gain from spiking oil prices is nuts. The regime and country have been absolutely savaged. I've been hating on American strategy a lot here because the American strategy is nonsensical but that doesn't mean that the USAF can't demolish buildings. They were in terrible shape before and much worse shape now than they were then. If the regime is to survive they need hard foreign currency. They need their oil on the market and as few of their competitors as possible as a matter of national survival. The rebuilding project will not be cheap and there are a lot of regime loyalists who will need to be paid.
Additionally it simply wouldn't make sense not to continue the position that they control the strait. Free navigation of the seas is a postwar American invention enforced by the US Navy. Lots of countries would like to declare that actually they own this bit of water or that bit of water and that everyone has to pay them transit fees or whatever but they haven't been able to because the US Navy will disprove that notion. These waterways aren't just open by default, they're national territory by default, open is an artificial state of affairs that has been constructed and maintained by the US Navy. If the US declares that they're no longer interested in keeping the strait open then it won't suddenly revert to free neutrality under a ceasefire. It'll be owned by the strongest.
This is existential for Iran. Either they establish a convincing deterrent by confronting the US Navy over the strait and winning (which includes the US Navy forfeiting) or they die. There's no deal to be made here where the strait is reopened any time soon, it'll stay closed until such a time as a country with sufficient force projection to open it opens it. Can/should the world make the US a pariah state for an illegal war of choice leading to global recession? How about the European countries facilitating it? Or is the US integrated into the global economy (and their European accomplices dependent) in such a way that they can't be held accountable for their crimes? What would any of that look like? Those are general questions not specific to Kwark btw. The question doesn't really make sense. Let's imagine a town filled with people. And not civic minded Nordic people who pick up litter when they go for a walk in the woods, let's imagine it's filled with people who would steal Amazon packages from each others' porches. Fortunately there's a chief of police and a police force and they mostly get everyone to behave and as such everyone in the town can benefit from the predictable order of law, they can order things from Amazon, they can leave the house to go to work and still have their stuff when they come home etc. If you start breaking the rules then you're excluded from the society, people won't let you in their shops, they won't sell you gasoline, you get disconnected from utilities, it's a bad time. Now let's imagine the chief of police fires the police force and burns down the courthouse. What you're asking is what he should be convicted of and how long he should spend in jail. It doesn't work. That is absolutely not the same thing as him getting away with the crime of burning down the courthouse, it's just no longer functional to think of burning down the courthouse as a crime. Getting away with a crime would be continuing to benefit from the society built on a system of rules without being held accountable for breaking them (Israel gets away with having nukes for example). What he has done is remove the rules entirely and return the town to the natural state of anarchy. That is not to say that there won't be consequences, it's just the concept of being prosecuted has gone. The consequences will show up with the power goes off because someone decided to steal the copper in the substation for scrap metal. They'll be more or less self imposed. In the scenario in which the US engages in an illegal war and sends the world into a global recession while destroying its own alliance system there are no more pariah states and there is no more accountability. This is what Carney was explaining so beautifully at Davos. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/ How do you figure this impacts Russia-Ukraine? Doesn't seem like it would bode well in Ukraine's favor, but perhaps the "middle powers" can use Ukraine as a focal point to rally around like a cloud seed?
A world in which the great powers do what they like and the middle powers work together to survive is one in which it is all the more important that Ukraine is protected and brought into the middle power fold.
In the long term it becomes a game theory exercise. The optimal choice for an individual nation is to benefit from rules while refusing to contribute to them. But if everyone does that then there are no rules and everyone is worse off. Therefore in theory everyone should sacrifice a little to contribute to the rules. But in practice there’s always someone saying “well I don’t want to, and as long as everyone else agrees to sacrifice a little more the rules will continue”.
Under US hegemony we didn’t need to decide what to do, collective action was the default reaction. Everyone important but China (who also agreed to suspend any sales of military equipment) agreed to make Russia a pariah, to impose sanctions, to limit trade, to send aid to Ukraine. Russia is probably the most uniquely placed country to survive that treatment due to its Soviet history (wasn’t fully integrated into the global economy, had local alternative sources for key things, has a nuclear arsenal) but it was still hugely damaging to them as we’ve seen. A consequence of their pariah status is that they’re losing in Ukraine. Under US hegemony countries were willing to pay into the system that benefited them. Germany was willing to forfeit gas etc., Spain was willing to send tanks.
In a hypothetical world without US hegemony were into a world of pure self interest. The Baltics might enter the war directly on Ukraine’s side because they know that they’re next but on the other hand Germany might continue to buy gas because it’s not their problem. Countries decide for themselves without a leader to rally behind. But all of that becomes moot because everyone has nukes now and they’re flying.
What Carney is advocating for is an alternative to nuclear annihilation in which groups of middle countries agree to work together without a hegemon. To continue to sacrifice a little for the collective good so that the nukes stay in their silos. Saving Ukraine would be a core mission of getting that off the ground, Ukraine has the potential to be a formidable industrial and military power and a key check on the ability of Russia to start shit.
But I don’t see that working long term honestly. Ukraine will be saved by the last gasps of the US led world order but down the line there’s always someone like Hungary who wants to bring nothing to the picnic and eat all the sandwiches.
If you think about it it’s really remarkable that it ever worked. You can just load a thousand luxury cars onto a boat and float it halfway around the world and be pretty certain it’ll show up unmolested. You can invest hugely in other countries and they don’t even steal it. You can source things from the most economically efficient locations and everyone can specialize. You can defend your assets and interests globally using just a piece of paper and the paper doesn't even have any guns but somehow it all works. The majority agreed to work together without engaging in petty self sabotage and the results have been incredible.
There has been an exponential acceleration in living standards globally for the last seventy years. We have all these countries that can’t even feed themselves just booming because they’re fed by all these other countries that can’t even make fertilizer. There are a lot of justifiable criticisms of the way the US has used their hegemony but I don’t think there can be any doubt that globally this has been the most significant period of growth and advancement in human history. The foundation of that is guarantees of safe trade, foreign investment, and collective action. It has been humanity for once working as a team. Not a perfect team, but far superior to how things were.
Short term Ukraine will be saved and ultimately become part of the European project. Long term our children will be poorer than we were and someone is going to eat a nuke at some point.
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The issue is that if someone eats a nuke the taboo is broken and then everyone starts eating nukes.
Maybe due to being so under American cultural influence, or having my formative years and views of the world shaped by new Atheism and Skepticism movements I always had a positive view of the USA hegemony, form a Croatian perspective, their interventions against Serbia came a bit too late, but they did save a lot of lives, ironically, given the current predicament, mostly Muslim lives.
These interventions that are constantly chastised by Russians and were, along with Iraq also used to justify the war in Ukraine to me, seemed just and fair, of course my views on the Iraq war were updated with the fallout from that, but if you look at Bosnia and Kosovo, those did turn out much better.
When Croatia joined NATO (this was the first time I got to vote in a referendum) I was overjoyed, it meant that my country gets to be safe without breaking the bank, we can take that money and invest it in us, and it made so much sense, we have a coalition of countries that are all on the same side, having each others backs and making sure no one fucks with us, of course, a lot of that came from the times that we lived in, and I don't really buy the story that USA kept it's insane levels of military spending to defend Croatia from Serbia, but it was a good story and it worked.
I have never heard a real rebuke to the overall net positives of USA hegemony, which is one of the reasons why I find people like GH who shit all over it so obnoxious, especially when it comes to the times that USA was under Democratic leadership.
During Clinton, Obama and Biden we had USA leaving Iraq and Afghanistan, intervening to help stop the massacres of Kosovars and Bosniaks and yes, we had Biden and Clinton embracing Israel and enabling its behavior of ethnic cleansing and genocide, but you get the wins that you can, you can't win them all and spending all of your time on criticizing the only side of the political spectrum that is not dedicated to destroying the world as we know it is patently insane to me.
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On March 25 2026 04:54 Jankisa wrote:
The issue is that if someone eats a nuke the taboo is broken and then everyone starts eating nukes.
Maybe due to being so under American cultural influence, or having my formative years and views of the world shaped by new Atheism and Skepticism movements I always had a positive view of the USA hegemony, form a Croatian perspective, their interventions against Serbia came a bit too late, but they did save a lot of lives, ironically, given the current predicament, mostly Muslim lives.
These interventions that are constantly chastised by Russians and were, along with Iraq also used to justify the war in Ukraine to me, seemed just and fair, of course my views on the Iraq war were updated with the fallout from that, but if you look at Bosnia and Kosovo, those did turn out much better.
When Croatia joined NATO (this was the first time I got to vote in a referendum) I was overjoyed, it meant that my country gets to be safe without breaking the bank, we can take that money and invest it in us, and it made so much sense, we have a coalition of countries that are all on the same side, having each others backs and making sure no one fucks with us, of course, a lot of that came from the times that we lived in, and I don't really buy the story that USA kept it's insane levels of military spending to defend Croatia from Serbia, but it was a good story and it worked.
I have never heard a real rebuke to the overall net positives of USA hegemony, which is one of the reasons why I find people like GH who shit all over it so obnoxious, especially when it comes to the times that USA was under Democratic leadership.
During Clinton, Obama and Biden we had USA leaving Iraq and Afghanistan, intervening to help stop the massacres of Kosovars and Bosniaks and yes, we had Biden and Clinton embracing Israel and enabling its behavior of ethnic cleansing and genocide, but you get the wins that you can, you can't win them all and spending all of your time on criticizing the only side of the political spectrum that is not dedicated to destroying the world as we know it is patently insane to me.
Your conclusion is the root of the problem, some people just want to watch the world burn (you find them right next to the flat earther)
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